For Regulatory Board Reformers

The Healthcare Alliance for Regulatory Board Reform (HARBR) is named as it is because the name is descriptive of our mission. Putting out fires is always a priority because of its urgency. Fire prevention is a priority because it is not in the best interest of persons, organizations or nations to live in a continual state of urgency.

In addition to assisting healthcare professionals secure fair hearing when they are in the cross-hairs of a regulatory board complaint, investigation or disciplinary action, HARBR works with lawmakers and rulemakers toward the creation of laws and rules which will assure healthcare providers of fair treatment if and when they are ever the recipient of a complaint or allegation.

“Good” healthcare providers need to be able to concentrate on their practices. They can only do this if, as good providers, they can feel very secure that they can make short and respectful work of any claims against them. “Good” healtchcare providers should not fear “the law.”

HARBR believes that “bad” providers should be called out and that there should be consequences for “bad practice. Whether this is facilitated by a fair regulatory board, or through the process of reputation and natural selection in the free market, “bad practice must meet with appropriate consequences. Inasmuch as HARBR believes the present set of cookie-cutter healthcare regulatory boards across the nation have NO evidence to show they can reliably differentiate the good and bad, the present system needs reform.

Despite HARBR’s descriptive name, not all HARBR members are “reformers.” Some are abolitionists, and are so for different reasons. One of those reasons is the belief that the healthcare regulatory system, as it is managed by functionally independent boards with no oversight, is so dysfunctional and broken that it needs to be raised and rebuilt. The reformers believe that something as simple as depriving boards of adjudication privileges may suffice.

Isaac Newton wrote three Laws of Motion in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687. Lex I, above translates:

“Law I: Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.”

To paraphrase Newton’s First Law of Motion (which I will call a law of “action and change:) in two parts:

An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless a force acts upon it.

An object that is in motion will not change its velocity or direction unless a force acts upon it.

HARBR is smaller than it’s mission. HARBR’s mission is to bring about reform in healthcare regulatory board structures. This mission is built upon a foundation of a demand for justice, period.

We invite activists everywhere to join us and to act with us – individuals, like-minded groups and organizations – social justice movers and fighters. Put us together and we have Mass. This is a Movement. We must act.